General

By Marcell Nimfuehr In January this year I travelled to Cameroon to make a health promotion film that featured Sylvestre, a patient who motivates others to seek treatment. Sylvestre is a softly spoken man in his 30s and at the hospital in Akonolinga town in east Cameroon he is the master of the television set […]

While South Africa, and its many guests from around the world, celebrate the 19th Fifa World Cup, two of the men who made it possible have been largely overlooked. They are two of our former presidents, Thabo Mbeki and Frederik Willem de Klerk. The former was president when the successful bid was launched, the latter […]

You have to be able to talk for someone to hear you. You have to be able to speak the same language for someone to understand you. You have to be able to express yourself if you want someone to be able to empathise or sympathise with you. But what if you can’t talk? What […]

South Africans should reject any suggestion that the vuvuzela is unpopular because we could not embrace such assertions without contradicting our own experience. The reality we know is that the horn epitomises the spirit of a football loving people, and any criticism devoid of the desire to understand the deep connection we share with the […]

Yesterday Marion and I went to the local shopping mall here where we live in Auckland, New Zealand. Whilst having some coffee we got into conversation with a Kiwi couple. I had first noticed him when I went to order the coffee from a takeaway in the food court. The two breakfasts he ordered looked […]

There is not much point in having a World Cup blog on such a respectable website if you are not going to take the opportunity to masquerade as an expert football analyst. By profession I am a lawyer, by instinct a sports commentator. And having attended around 300 Arsenal games in my life so far […]

There are some moments in life where you have to put aside well-honed cynicism and a diligently instilled sense of perspective. So it was for me on Friday. My usual column on politics — Contretemps — was on page 32 of the Mail & Guardian and it argued that, alas, for all the excitement, new […]

There is a Bible story about a fearless, stubborn, “non-citizen” outsider-woman who demands the intervention of Jesus in the “small matter” of her child’s sickness. When Jesus rejects her request, she becomes so insistent that a heated debate ensues. During the debate she (her like and kind) are likened to “dogs” that do not have […]

Know the Tutu story? Or is it Kenyatta who first told it? When the white man came to Africa, Africans had the land and the white man had the Bible. The white man said “let us pray” and after the prayer the Africans had the bible and the white man had the land. Now — […]

The World Cup spirit is felt everywhere here in Khayelitsha! Since I arrived a year ago from Brazil to work for MSF in this impoverished township near Cape Town, I have never seen the patients so proud as today! They come to the clinic wearing their yellow and green Bafana Bafana jerseys, so excited about […]

I was on Long Street last night in Cape Town, and the scenes that greeted me were utterly fantastic. Germans, Australians, Greeks, Chileans, English, Americans, Uruguayans, South Africans and Frenchman were all over the show doing their best to inject their own particular national brand of energy into the evening’s proceedings. Even outside the Grand […]

By Jackie Mapiloko For the last two months I’ve been working on a story that was going to change my life. It should have been published weeks ago, but I remember saying to my boss: “There’s something missing, I need more time.” If this story’s aim was to make every humanitarians stomach turn with anger, […]